{"id":56560,"date":"2026-07-27T10:46:31","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56560"},"modified":"2026-07-27T10:46:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:46:31","slug":"when-gifts-of-public-land-ignore-reparative-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56560","title":{"rendered":"When \u2018gifts\u2019 of public land ignore reparative justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nJuly 14, 2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>Gordon Laughlin is appalled by the treatment of the Hadeed family. He writes: \u201cThe Hadeed family has been part of Trinidad and Tobago\u2019s business community for generations, creating jobs, investing locally, and building respected brands. Today, they face one of the greatest challenges in their history as the legal process surrounding the state-of-emergency detention continues through the courts\u201d (Express, July 11).
\n
\nHe appeals to the larger community: \u201cIt is now time for others to speak up as well. Former employees, customers, members of the business community and ordinary citizens who believe the Hadeeds have acted in good faith should not feel intimidated into silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, he did not include those workers and families of the Orange Estates (that is, the Trinidad Sugar Estates) who were robbed of their ancestors\u2019 inheritance by these gifts of public lands to the Hadeeds and the dealings of the PNM government that left the sugar workers empty-handed.<\/p>\n

This observer\/researcher has been speaking out about these injustices for a long time. On October 1, 2018, I wrote in the Express:<\/p>\n

\u201cWilliam Hardin Burnley, Trinidad\u2019s biggest slave owner, owned 14 sugar estates, the largest of which were Providence in the South and Orange Grove in the north, with 234 and 202 enslaved people, respectively. His son, William Frederick Burnley, inherited his father\u2019s fortune.\u201d He never stepped foot in Trinidad.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Cudjoe, my great-grandfather, was born in Tacarigua, Trinidad, in 1833, one year before the enslaved were set free. His son, Robert James Cudjoe (b 1876), my grandfather, his children, and many of his grandchildren worked on Burnley\u2019s estate which was changed to the Trinidad Sugar Estates (TSE). \u201cI can still remember seeing my grandfather, hunched over his Raleigh bicycle, riding to the OG factory five days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

My brother and I also worked at the factory in one capacity or the other.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat same land is now leased by Dominic Hadeed and goes under the name of Blue Waters. Eziz Hadeed, Dominic\u2019s father, came from Syria in the 1960s and started selling clothes. Later, he founded the Fabric Land chain of stores. In 1996, he founded Blue Waters which is located at the Trincity Industrial Estates.\u201d<\/p>\n

On February 6, 2021, I followed up with the observation: \u201cI am still trying to understand why Blue Waters needed to import 39 non-nationals to work on its bottling plan when there is such high unemployment among our youths and specialised workers from Petrotrin and other related enterprises.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Kamla Persad questioned Stuart Young about the matter, the latter explained: \u2018This was a request by a manufacturer to bring specialised workers to upgrade their plant. This is not unusual or unique. The persons entering [the country] would have presented their negative PCR test, they may be paying for their quarantine at a State-supervised quarantine facility.\u201d (Express, January 30, 2021.)<\/p>\n

Persad-Bissessar continued to raise her objection to this indecent exemption; Young scolded her: \u201cIt has become worrying that the Leader of the Opposition \u2018may be becoming delusional\u2019…as she continues to struggle for relevance.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cI was hoping that after her dire and abysmal failure, in front of the country in the Parliament on Wednesday, Mrs Persad-Bissessar would take some time for her personal health and do some introspection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that some of these issues are being ventilated more publicly, Camille Robinson-Regis feels it necessary to defend the PNM\u2019s giveaway of these ancestral lands:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s mischievously crafted by this Government [UNC] to put it in the public that this matter was hustled to satisfy a \u2018PNM financier\u2019, who as far as I know, is not a so-called \u2018financier\u2019 when it took its due process in accordance with the advice of attorneys at CSS.\u201d (Guardian, July 11, 2026.)<\/p>\n

The only problem with this reasoning is that the black and brown people who worked on those lands for more than a century never entered the discussion. We were treated as the imported buffaloes that the TSE brought into the island to work on the estates to fatten the purses of the white, colonialist class.<\/p>\n

PNM\u2019s betrayal of our people did not begin with Rowley, Robinson-Regis, and others. It began on October 31, 1975, when International Property Development, the former owners of Orange Sugar Estates Ltd, sold Burnley\u2019s land (3,500 acres of prime property) to Home Construction Ltd for $15,016,800.<\/p>\n

Home Construction paid $780,000 in cash to buy this land. It received a loan of $10,216,800 from Barclays Bank, the owners of whom participated in our enslavement. In this way, Burnley\u2019s slave-holding lands became the property of local capitalists. The directors of this company (HCL) were Tajmool Hosein, Ameer Edoo and Mervyn de Souza who worked closely with Eric Williams. (See my essay, \u201cSlavery, Colonialism, Independence, \u2018the Same Khaki Pants\u2019: The Exploitation of the Working People Continues\u201d in my book Movement of the People (1983). My most recent book, The Slave Master of Trinidad, examines the life of Burnley and the Orange Grove Sugar Estates.<\/p>\n

While I admire Laughlin\u2019s defence of the Hadeeds and Robinson-Regis\u2019s attempt to gloss over PNM failure to support and empower black people, it might be more appropriate for her to examine where the PNM went wrong and why they forgot the working people in their governance.<\/p>\n

It is important that Robinson-Regis and the Hadeeds examine how social and reparative justice come into play in their dealing with the native populations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe July 14, 2026 Gordon Laughlin is appalled by the treatment of the Hadeed family. He writes: \u201cThe Hadeed family has been part of Trinidad and Tobago\u2019s business community for generations, creating jobs, investing locally, and building respected brands. Today, they face one of the greatest challenges in their history as … Continue reading When \u2018gifts\u2019 of public land ignore reparative justice<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[171],"class_list":["post-56560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56561,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56560\/revisions\/56561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}